Andrew Murray was previously seconded to Labour’s general election campaign from Unite.
Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Jeremy Corbyn has drafted in Andrew Murray, the controversial former communist who is chief of staff to the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, as a part-time consultant, as Labour hones its Brexit strategy.

Murray, who was seconded to Labour’s general election campaign as a donation-in-kind from Unite, the party’s biggest financial backer, is working for the leader’s office a day and a half a week, a party spokesman confirmed.

A longtime member of the communist party, who has in the past expressed solidarity with North Korea, Murray joined Labour only in 2016, after Corbyn’s victory – and is loathed by MPs on the right of the party.

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Unite continues to pay Murray’s salary, which Labour said had been formally declared to the Electoral Commission. A donation for “staff costs” of £15,761 from the union was declared at the end of January.

His roles include sitting in on senior job interviews and discussing party strategy – which has given rise to anxiety among some shadow ministers about his potential influence, including over Brexit.

A former chair of the Stop the War coalition, and longstanding friend of Corbyn’s most senior adviser, Seumas Milne, Murray has in the past been fiercely critical of the European Union.

One shadow cabinet minister said: “I see him around in the leader’s office and it’s a puzzle what he’s doing there.” Another claimed Murray was a “lexiter” – a leftwing advocate of Brexit – whose views were more hardline than those of many trade unionists or Labour members.

Speaking at a conference in 2012 during the eurozone financial crisis, Murray compared the actions of eurozone governments, enacting austerity policies at the behest of Brussels and the International Monetary Fund, to the Vichy regime in France during the second world war.

“They said we’ll give you our power and we’ll take a step back so you can deal with the crisis. You can impose the economic measures which could be fatal to any democratic politician, and then you can give us back the power when it makes no difference.

“There’s no perfect historical parallels, but it’s more like the fact that the Vichy regime of the 1940s in France was established by a vote of the remnants of the third republic’s parliament, handing over power to a dictator because the democratically elected had lost the will to fight,” Murray said, warning that in the European financial crisis, “the politicians themselves have been incapable defenders of democracy”.

The debate has sometimes pitched a new generation of Corbyn-backing Labour members, many of whom are keenly pro-EU, against an older generation of leftists, who shared Tony Benn’s scepticism of the European project, and remain lukewarm or even hostile.

A Labour spokesperson insisted it was “normal practice for trades union staff to be seconded to MPs’ offices – there’s nothing unusual about it”. But some of the party’s senior figures feel uncomfortable about the senior roles being played by individuals who are not longtime party members.

Richard Angell, director of the centrist Labour group Progress, said:“It is funny how the new establishment so quickly behave in a way that they so hated about the old establishment: a small cabal making all the decisions and dishing out well-paid jobs to their mates. You could not make it up.”

McNicol became a lightning rod for criticism over the row about the rules for Labour’s leadership challenge in 2016, which ended up in the high court, although he then went on to work closely with Corbyn’s lieutenants, including Murray, during the general election campaign.

McNicol’s departure was announced abruptly on Friday night, before party staff had been given the news. Some Labour MPs now speculate that Murray may be being groomed as a potential successor, but Unite official Jennie Formby appears to be the front-runner.

The post is voted on by Labour’s ruling national executive committee, on which Corbyn now has a secure majority after the most recent set of elections.

When challenged during the election campaign about Murray’s role, Corbyn described him as “a person of enormous abilities” and stressed that he was helping Labour “temporarily”. He also insisted that Murray was not a Stalinist, but “a democratic socialist and member of the Labour party like me”.

A Unite spokesman said: “Unite makes no apology for its support for Labour, through fair weather and foul, nor for our commitment to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from the outset. Andrew Murray’s part-time secondment is one expression of that support.”